Wireless networks using unlicensed bands are very popular and used at many places. Wi-Fi represents a widely adopted technology all over the world operating in the unlicensed 2.4 GHZ and/or 5 GHz bands. As Wi-Fi gets widely adopted, the unlicensed bands get crowded and access points have to mitigate interferences by appropriate channel allocation techniques. Moreover as unlicensed bands are open by nature to different kinds of network protocols, devices operating in those bands must deal with various types of interferences. The 2.4 GHz unlicensed band is for example used by microwave ovens, Bluetooth devices, cordless phones, baby monitors and IEEE 802.15.4 devices, also known as ZigBee devices. Some methods are known for mitigating interference problems such as dynamic channel allocation methods being performed by access points. Dynamic channel allocation methods generally comprise an access point scanning the frequency band, measuring a received signal strength on various frequency channels and looking for a frequency channel with a reasonably low level of activity. Because an access point is not located at the same place as its associated devices, there may be situations where an associated device is locally disturbed by another wireless interfering device that is not in the range of the access point. In such a situation, even if the access point detects a degradation of the transmission performance with an associated device, the access point has no technical element to diagnose the problem and to fix it. As the interfering device is not in the range of the access point, there is no way for the access point to determine the origin of the problem. Such performance degradations are frequent reasons of a perceived malfunction of a Wi-Fi network by a user that may reject the fault to her Wi-Fi gateway.
Moreover, with the rapid growth of smart home solutions based on IEEE 802.15.4, also known as ZigBee, having a smaller coverage than Wi-Fi and sixteen channels overlapping Wi-Fi channels, such situations occur more and more frequently. A solution is needed for enabling an access point to detect interferences occurring at a remote place and disturbing some of its wireless associated devices.